1. Where is the cup of the poet, this nectar?
The night of revelry has made the loved ones desolate!

2. Why, O life, when you have made his heart your abode,
Do you prefer the passion of the grateful lover?

3. You have withdrawn your hands from him when they were adorned
With that sublime, brilliant courtesy.

4. Had he lived on, his art would have increased
Marvels that cannot be matched.

5. You would have gained from his acting and singing
The most delicate example and the richest bird.

6. Hope erased the specter of his imagination,
And the hand of cruel time snatched him away.

7. Our joy at his forthcoming day
Became the tragedy of one dead in early youth,

8. Lying with the thorns of the road in his shroud,
Like a pure martyr.

9. Take back the elegies, O friends of his youth,
You will not quench with tears the agony of remembrance.

10. This was a youth who composed and molded youth itself
As inspiration flowing from the most delicate emotions.

11. He made the fleeting thirties his career
And eternity the goal of his brief life.

12. Sing to him with the poetry in which his longing throbbed
To the rhythm of the visiting beloved.

13. Sing to him with the poetry in which his breath pulsed
To the rhythm of the departing beloved.

14. Those wandering rhymes scattered in their first bloom
Melted on the lute‐string of the magic singer.

15. So listen to their echoes in a procession
Of death thronged with piercing laments.

16. Nature walked in him between silent brooks
And breakers crashing yonder.

17. Had it been possible, she would have lined his bier
With her leaves, the pall cast with her flowers,

18. As her birds’ laments glittered forth
Nations crept to bid the poet farewell.

19. O son of the imagination, the atoms asked about you
And the meteors amid the nebulae and blossoms.

20. Were the shores you neared veiled in tempests
And seething tumult the same as when you adventured?

21. Does your wing still span the sky
As of old, cleaving the traveling dawn?

22. Does your sail still wear in the haze
The circle of the rainy cloud?

23. The struggle is over for him who lived
In the world with an adventurous spirit.

24. And time has folded all but the verses of a poet
More lasting than the wandering ideal.

25. Poetry that represented every delicate sense
Not arranging words and ordering ideas,

26. And dummies whose paint is smeared
Like the boards of theaters masked with curtains

27. To represent history in its costumes
Between the applause and the mocker’s smile

28. Made by authors whose imagination barely sufficed
To dust the glass from the swirling dust,

29. Leaving the age as if they were
Ghosts of a cave or shades of prisoners.

30. O people, poetry is spirituality
And the intelligence of a heart in flaming thought.

31. The “blind” one saw through it beyond
What the hands of the helpless or eyes of the seer touched,

32. Recognizing the forms of creation, penetrating
The depths of souls and the secrets of minds.

33. Adorned with a hennaed hand heavy with bracelets,
The stars her longing, her hot desire,

34. Her embracing arm and her hugging breast.
Poetry is the music of life oozing

35. From every bursting vein.
If Babylon’s lovers were given to drink its nectar

36. They would not have recalled it as heady wine,
And their cups would have listened enchanted

37. To a joyous, magic eloquence,
Or it would have spoken to their tower in its language

38. While the people are diverse tongues and larynxes.
We would not have doubted the twisted tongue, and the argots

39. Of this discordant world would have been united!